Searching for the Future

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On a recent trip to Vancouver I stumbled upon the documentary Manufactured Landscapes, which tracks Burtynsky as he documents the ongoing reinvention of China. (It will begin a U.S. run in June, at Film Forum, in New York.) Directed by Jennifer Baichwal, the film opens with a slow pan inside a factory in Xiamen City. The shot goes on seemingly forever because the factory building is absurdly long. Even in Burtynsky’s still photo of the factory’s interior, the building seems to continue beyond the vanishing point. So if you want to know what the twenty-first century looks like, maybe you look at Maisel’s shot of greater L.A. stretching from the Pacific to the San Gabriel Mountains or at Burtynsky’s Chinese factory that extends to the edge of topological improbability.

Manufactured Landscapes offers a handy synopsis of the extraordinary work Burtynsky did in China: he photographed the factories where the bulk of our consumer goods are manufactured, documented the leveling of the 13 cities that were about to be inundated by the Three Gorges Dam, and tracked the unparalleled urban-renewal movement that has transformed Shanghai into a modern high-rise city.

Burtynsky is now beginning to tackle a subject larger than China. “I’ve been interested in trying to photograph things that may exist today that will not exist tomorrow,” he says. He’s set out to document the idea of peak oil and its impact on society. “I’m looking at the industry and the oil fields and the last great sources of oil on the planet.”

I asked Burtynsky which of his photos best depicts the present moment. He replies, “The one Shanghai picture where it’s just this forest of skyscrapers is the one that, to me, stands as a sobering reminder of a world we’re creating.” Burtynsky is clearly not the first one pointing to China as the spot where this century’s course will be determined, but his perspective is uniquely powerful. He tells me that China expects a migration from rural areas to cities of as many as 300 million people in the next 10 to 15 years. “What are the cities going to look like with that many people in them?” he asks.

Implicit in both Maisel’s and Burtynsky’s work is the notion that we are pushing the limits of how much we can make and build and consume. Certainly both are crafting powerful messages about the environmental impact of modern life. At the same time they create works of extraordinary beauty. It’s a paradox—to draw our attention to the overwhelming awfulness of what we’ve created by living our contemporary lives, these photographers must make it eye-catching. Embedded in that contradiction, however, is a genuine insight about our particular moment: it’s a beautiful nightmare. The iPod in your pocket is as gorgeous and mysterious as the monolith worshipped by the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but in truth we know as little about our fetish objects’ origins as Stanley Kubrik’s primitives did. Burtynsky’s photos demonstrate how the production of little changes one routinely sees on the street—like the proliferation of attention-sucking gadgets—has caused an epic transformation on the other side of the world. Maisel sums up the situation as “seduction and betrayal. We’re all seduced by the pleasure of twenty-first-century life, but then there’s a payback.” Or maybe it’s the butterfly effect in reverse: a cell phone rings in New Jersey, and it causes an earthquake in China.

Provided by Metropolis Magazine—The Magazine of Architecture, Culture, and Design